Charlotte E. Rosen breaks down the political ramifications of Max's "The Pitt" for subjects of an anti-expertise, anti-empathy fascist regime.
DESPITE A MODEST premiere in January, The Pitt, Max's new medical drama, has become a genuine viral sensation, achieving 13 consecutive weeks of growth and becoming one of the three most watched Max shows ever. Critics have been generally effusive, but they also convey mild befuddlement at the show's capacity to engross its viewers. "Even as my brain kept pointing out all the ways its format works against it and all the little bits that could be improved," Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk wrote, "I found myself powering through The Pitt with so much delight that I became actively annoyed when I had to pause to watch something ostensibly better and more innovative."
Theories abound as to why the slightly soapy, standard-in-form workplace medical drama (created by R. Scott Gemmill, a writer for turn-of-the-century network dramas including JAG and ER) has captured the hearts and minds of so many Americans. Many have lauded its impeccable pacing and editing, its throwback to old-school network TV's mix of short and long story arcs, and its energizing, 24-style format (The Pitt's first season covers one shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room). "It feels new because it feels old," Defector's Marc Asch remarked, noting that the key to its virality is that it is "profoundly, gratifyingly normal." Others have cited the show's representation of competence in a high-stakes, life-and-death job, at precisely the moment when the Trump administration appears hell-bent on extinguishing such vital forms of expertise and leadership. Still others have noted its authenticity, with medical professionals remarking on the show's rare relatability and accuracy in its portrayal of an emergency room setting.
Some have also commented on the show's engagement with an improbable range of social issues, though this aspect of the show has also received some of the most pointed criticism. "I do wonder if maybe they've taken on a bit too many issues for one season," one critic lamented.
These critiques are fair. Within its 15 episodes, The Pitt tackles nearly every political issue of the moment -- COVID-19, racism, transphobia, sex trafficking, abortion, fatphobia, homelessness, white male rage, childhood sexual abuse, addiction, mass shootings, vaccine skepticism, the carceral state, the encroaching threat of (and spurious justification for) private equity's takeover of underfunded public health infrastructure. In its checklist-style, homiletic approach to teachable moments, the show can feel almost parodic.
One exchange, between Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) and Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif), verges on the kind of dialogue you might expect from a corporate training video. In the scene, the two doctors discuss a patient whom McKay had discharged earlier that day with a UTI. It turns out, however, that the patient was suffering from a more serious endometrial infection, leading her to lose consciousness and crash her car, incurring additional injuries. Dr. Collins pulls Dr. McKay aside to suggest that McKay may have unconsciously discriminated against the patient due to her size:
COLLINS: Her size doesn't inherently make her unhealthy.
MCKAY: Are you saying I was biased against the patient because of her weight?
COLLINS: I raise it as a possibility, not as an accusation.
MCKAY: Wow. I mean, I really don't think that's the case here, but I will look out for it.
The Pitt is dotted with similarly expository exchanges. In a different political moment, this kind of didacticism might strain believability and distract from an otherwise affecting portrayal of the distinct forms of camaraderie, conflict, and grief that mark the experience of working in emergency medicine.
In our current era of emboldened fascism, however, The Pitt's lack of subtlety functions differently. For some, scenes like the one above -- which emphasizes the necessity of addressing unequal power dynamics -- will feel newly urgent and clarifying. Even if the show's production preceded the election, The Pitt is a clear response to the toxic political culture that helped propel Donald Trump into office. Contrasted with the rise of right-wing manospheric populism, white supremacism, and Make America Healthy Again-style eugenicism, basic reminders that many people don't feel that way register as surprisingly potent. Again and again, the show highlights its characters' investment in social equality -- a formula, to be sure, but one that registers as more galvanizing than cloying.
Which is to say, The Pitt's literalism may be its superpower. In the face of mass institutional acquiescence to fascism, there's a lot to be said for loudly asserting the value of radical empathy and social justice.
Amid the Right's ongoing and vicious criminalization of trans people, for example, it is refreshing to see med student Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) proactively -- and frictionlessly -- change a trans patient's name and gender in her file after she had been deadnamed by the front desk receptionist. Similarly, the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) and the steady proliferation of deadly abortion bans in many states lend power to another subplot, in which Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) slightly distorts medical records to allow a teenager to receive an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy. "She's 17," Dr. Robby explains, "she deserves a life." Notwithstanding the somewhat spiritless writing, the doctors' discussion about Dr. McKay's patient with the endometrial infection does make concrete how unchecked fatphobia in medicine compounds harm, sometimes with fatal consequences.
It's easy to be cynical about such demonstrations, whether for their self-seriousness or their glaring political limitations. But by dramatizing the material impact of anti-racist, feminist, and queer-affirming approaches to care, The Pitt offers a practical rebuke to the distressing wave of institutional compliance with Trump's anti-DEI mandates -- from universities to law firms to medical schools and hospitals. Such easy capitulation to Trump's reactionary, plainspokenly fascist directives is not just morally shameful, The Pitt suggests -- it will quite literally kill people.
The blood on these institutions' hands is made literal in The Pitt's close calls and near misses. Only the doctors' awareness of historically unequal power dynamics, clunky and corny as it may be, produces a critical healing antidote. (No thanks to the hospital's feckless administrator, who appears less concerned with patient care than with the corporate bottom line.) In The Pitt, taking action to combat exclusion and subvert oppressive structures is medical best practice, and central to the doctors' mandate to "do no harm." In portraying both the true stakes and practical ease of making emergency medical care truly more inclusive -- and, indeed, demonstrating how such awareness improves outcomes for all patients -- The Pitt makes a mockery of the Right's pathetic, transparently racist framing of DEI as itself discriminatory and devaluing.
But The Pitt's pro-woke messaging also serves as a useful reproof to those on the "left" who have bizarrely ceded legitimacy to the Right's anti-woke hysteria. In these ideologues' view, DEI is not bad because it's anti-white and empowers "disqualified" people, but rather because it is a counterinsurgent, neoliberal project orchestrated by corporate elites to crush radical social movements and smooth the way for capitalism's continuation.
To be sure, the version of DEI adopted by most workplaces and institutions was far from a revolutionary project. Corporate appeals to anti-racism after the 2020 George Floyd uprisings frequently amounted to performative stunts that gave CEOs and university presidents cover to ignore more tangible demands and, in some cases, make even more profits. Moreover, many of the day-to-day DEI initiatives, such as affinity groups and equity trainings, discouraged materialist analyses, defining emancipation through a market-friendly lens of greater representation and transforming individual hearts and minds. More diverse boardrooms and fewer office Chads saying slurs became the mark of DEI success, and not, say, mass unionization or the redistribution of wealth.
But these valid critiques of corporate DEI's limitations need not result in a blanket dismissal of efforts to create anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ+-affirming culture, something that The Pitt makes manifest. The everyday work of being less bigoted and more empathetic, of trying to make historically exclusionary institutions fairer and more inclusive, is not necessarily subject to elite capture. Such efforts can, in fact, help resist what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the "organized abandonment" of populations rendered surplus and subjected to "group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death," a central component, it turns out, of keeping capitalism afloat.
In one scene, for example, the EMTs bring in a Black female patient, clearly in agonizing pain, whom they present incriminatingly as a "drug-seeking woman kicked off a city bus for disrupting and disturbing passengers." Describing her as "uncooperative and combative since we picked her up," the EMTs (who are both white) restrain her and threaten to call the cops. The woman, whom we learn is named Joyce, manages to scream "I have sickle cell," a disease that disproportionately affects people of African descent and is historically understudied and underfunded. In response, Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), who recognizes the source of Joyce's pain, demands that the EMTs remove Joyce's restraints and that she be treated with opioids.
Even then, however, Joyce continues to face racialized and gendered suspicion. Student doctor Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) -- a white, wide-eyed, corn-fed farm boy from rural Nebraska -- suggests that Joyce's opioid dosage is still too high, asking, "How do you know she's not drug-seeking?" Dr. Mohan retorts with a description of the excruciating effects of sickle cell anemia, prompting Whitaker to sheepishly retreat. "[A] little empathy goes a long way with those suffering in real pain," Dr. Mohan instructs. As it turns out, she's right; it's only due to Dr. Mohan's close attention that Joyce gets the care that she needs. Even more telling, Dr. Whitaker -- originally hostile to another patient, one who actually is drug-addicted -- ends the season by volunteering with the hospital's street team, seemingly brought around to a more compassionate worldview.
These arcs, overwrought as they may be, illustrate why entertaining right-wing attacks on "wokeness," even for putatively progressive reasons, is so dangerous. There's no time for purity testing or posturing, The Pitt suggests, when you're trying to prevent the premature death of working-class people. (Something you can only do, it turns out, with an analysis of capitalism's racial and gendered manifestations.)
The threat of liberal co-optation always lurks. Gloria (Michael Hyatt), the hospital's chief administrator, is only too happy to celebrate the team's methods when their response to a mass casualty event earns them favorable coverage. But throughout its first season, The Pitt delivers a consistent message: confronting discrimination is still a profoundly radical act in an era when people of color face disproportionately worse healthcare outcomes and patient care, women's pain is routinely dismissed, and nearly half of trans people (including 68 percent of trans people of color) have reported medical mistreatment.
For all of its PSA-style self-seriousness, then, The Pitt's unabashedly "woke" vignettes constitute a powerful rebuke to a regime that is determined to usher in a new era of Jim Crow. Though far from an explicitly anti-capitalist piece of propaganda, The Pitt resonates because it demonstrates how opposition to all forms of oppression is a life-affirming project for all, one that contains the seeds of a radical reorganization of our currently death-dealing society. In the undoubtedly bleak fight ahead, such clarity is politically stirring.